Resumo de Privacy In Employment Law

Many employers in the United States have been initiating or
expanding policies requiring background checks of
prospective employees. The ability to perform such checks
has been abetted by the growth of computerized databases and
of commercial enterprises that facilitate access to personal
information. Employers now have ready access to public
information that had heretofore been difficult to collect
without an expenditure of considerable effort and money
criminal records, litigation history, worker-compensation
claims, marriage records, bankruptcy liens, court judgments,
and more. They also have ready access to private information
credit-card history, airline use, certain telephone records,
bank-account histories, pharmacy records, and even records
of medical visits. The ready availability of these data
creates the serious possibility of promiscuous, unfair, and
perhaps even abusive investigations, and yet access to these
data is subject to few legal limits. Systematic inquiry into
such personal information is nevertheless commonly
understood to constitute a serious and harmful intrusion
upon an individual's privacy.
Higher education has not been immune to the siren call for
background information. Legislation mandating background
checks for all employees of certain public institutions
(which may include all or some public institutions of higher
education) has been adopted in at least one state. The
purchasing consortium of the Committee on Institutional
Cooperation (made up of the Big Ten universities and the
University of Chicago) now makes available at a discount the
services of a background-checking company; it is for each
participating institution to decide whether and how these
services will be used. Some colleges and universities have
initiated or expanded background investigations of
candidates for faculty appointments. This interest in
background checks has arisen despite the absence of any
systematic study of the need for the information such checks
might produce. The interest within higher education was
especially stimulated by the extraordinary discovery in 2003
that a respected member of the faculty at Pennsylvania State
University had for decades been on parole for murders he
committed in another state when he was a teenager. The
misrepresentation of faculty credentials or experience is
not totally foreign to higher education. But such
sensational incidents are fortunately few, and almost all
can be avoided if faculty search committees exercise
reasonable care.

Resumos Relacionados